AN Improvement in robustness of a system dynamics model for simulating cost of quality in manufacturing operations

© American Society for Engineering Management, 2019.The use of System Dynamics to model, understand, and predict the behavior of complex systems has grown steadily over the last two decades. One complex phenomenon that has received considerable attention of researchers in the System Dynamics discipline is the Economics of Quality, specifically the Cost of Quality, in manufacturing organizations. The Cost of Quality is a composite of various costs associated with activities concerning defect prevention, appraisal, and both internal and external failure. There are at least five different studies that model Cost of Quality in an organization via System Dynamics, and of them, Visawan and Tannock's model provides the most comprehensive description of a manufacturing facility. However, other studies on the Visawan-Tannock model have identified an inherent flaw in the model in that it accepts one large investment intervention toward defect prevention activities to attain six-sigma-levels of operations: An obviously unrealistic behavior. This study proposes a correction to this identified flaw through the addition of an extra module to the Visawan and Tannock's model that has been tested for compliance with the reported values in the literature.

AN Improvement in robustness of a system dynamics model for simulating cost of quality in manufacturing operations Academic Article in Scopus